Geopolitics

The U.S. Coast Guard has sunk an abandoned Japanese fishing boat off the coast of Alaska, more than a year after a tsunami sent it drifting aimlessly across the Pacific Ocean.

The 50-meter long Ryou-Un Mara went down Thursday in the Gulf of Alaska, hours after a Coast Guard vessel started shooting at it, setting fire to the so-called “ghost ship,” which had no lights, crew or communications system.

The Coast Guard decided to sink the Ryou-Un Mara because it posed a significant danger to ships sailing in the area. Officials say sinking the ship poses no risk to the environment and that any fuel on board would be evaporated by now. The sinking operation was delayed when a Canadian fishing boat expressed interest in salvaging the Japanese boat. The Canadian ship eventually determined it could not tow the crippled vessel…

Remember how the Bush era had pivotal, history-altering characters with names like “Brownie” and “Curveball”? The latter comes clean and has no regrets, via the Independent:

A man who helped to make the case for invading Iraq – starting a nine-year war costing more than 100,000 lives and hundreds of billions of pounds – will come clean in his first British television interview tomorrow. “Curveball”, the Iraqi defector who fabricated claims about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction, smiles as he confirms how he made the whole thing up.

When it is put to him, “We went to war in Iraq on a lie. And that lie was your lie”, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi simply replies: “Yes.”

His lies were presented as “facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence” by Colin Powell when making the case for war at the UN Security Council in February 2003, after US officials “sexed up” Mr Janabi’s drawings of mobile biological weapons labs, admits General Powell’s former chief of staff.

Mr. Janabi tries to defend his actions: “My main purpose was to topple the tyrant in Iraq.”

Via the Council on Foreign Relations website: The United States’ failure to educate its students leaves them unprepared to compete and threatens the country’s ability to thrive in a global economy and…

Matador Network on the “worst attempts at helping others since colonialism”. There’s the inexplicable — entrepreneur Jason Sadler’s 1 Million T-Shirts campaign, which involved producing and shipping a million t-shirts for donation…

Michael Edwards writes on InfoWars: The Obama Administration, by Executive Order, has moved another step closer to preemptive war with Iran by declaring a National Emergency to deal with this supposed threat. A National…

WikiLeaks takes on Sweden’s elite? Russia Today writes: The world famous whistleblowing group WikiLeaks claims it has documents exposing Sweden’s FM Carl Bildt as an American spy and is promising to publish…

From Military Resistance: “At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. Oh had I the ability, and could reach the nation’s ear, I would, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke.” —Frederick Douglass, 1852

Oil prices are rocketing. Iranian warships are moving into the Mediterranean to shadow the US warships already there. Propaganda news is growing with rumors of Al Qaeda links with Iran, and, then, less speculative news about real links between the terror groups and the armed opposition in Syria.

As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi puts it, the smell of war is in the air and on the air,

“You can just feel it: many of the same newspapers and TV stations we saw leading the charge in the Bush years have gone back to the attic and are dusting off their war pom-poms.”

Scores of black-clad female “ninja” fighters whose ages range from 5 to 56 are just a handful of 3,000 women in Iran who are being trained as lethal warriors at a school in Tehran. “We train women to have strength and ability. We have to do everything in our power to protect our homeland,” said Akbar Faraji, who runs the school. One of the fighters who has been training for over 13 years said, “Our aim is for Iranian women to be strengthened and if a problem arises, we will definitely declare our readiness to defend our Islamic homeland.”

Via Naked Capitalism, researcher Erica Chenoweth attempted to qualify which style of insurgency is more effective — she claims nonviolent action has a better yield: Occupy’s public discussions on “diversity of tactics”…